Tag: rant

Full disclaimer: the title is a total clickbait. Still I’m very concerned about the current state of Instagram and the direction the site has taken. Here are some of my grievances:

I haven’t seen anyone but bots in a while. Sure, that’s a gross exaggeration, but it certainly feels like actual people are in the minority on the site. Most accounts that like or follow me are spambots or some low-tier SMM guys from developing world.

My major grievance is lack of posting in official API. Sure, there are unofficial private API wrappers, but why should users jump through the hoops? Limiting access to CRUD operations in public API is walled garden approach at its finest.

No links. Instagram prohibits adding clickable links and copying in both descriptions and comments. I understand they’re doing it to minimize spam, but it’s like getting rid of intestines to avoid diarrhea. Also, see the first point. How much should it take before ineffectiveness of this approach is evident? In the meanwhile there is no way for the regular user to share a link to a bigger story.

It doesn’t cater towards its original target audience – the amateur photographers. Instagram is no longer a network for good phone photography (or attempts at that), most pics one sees today are selfies, which says a lot about the current target audience of the service. Introduction of Stories (which is 100% Snapchat rip-off) cemented this trend.

I’m still using the service for sharing what I deem interesting shots and occasional videos, but I’m also using Flickr as some kind of mirror feed and to be honest Instagram starts to feel like dead weight.

MongoDB $nin and $ne and $exists: false queries are super expensive. I mean there is a point at which they are basically unusable. And I learned it the hard way, having developed a service, that relies heavily on this kind of queries to emulate queue-like workflow. 5+ million documents later and I’m hurriedly adding indexes for all flags that take more than 60 seconds to query for.

Information on this issue is limited to a short FAQ entry at Mongo docs and a couple StackOverflow answers. That’s it. Come on, it should be the first thing people see, when they open Mongo docs – a huge dialog you should scroll through three times before you can click accept.

My own ThinkPad X201 workhorse For those, who have limited time, this post comes down to the following statement: Lenovo Thinkpad X201 is the best X-series Thinkpad created yet (although after a somewhat heated discussion at Reddit, x220 looks better). What follows is my attempt at proving this point with my merely anecdotal evidence. I’m funny like that. Here comes a short story of my relationship with Lenovo Thinkpad X series.

In 2013 I’ve been working as a technical writer (more technical than a writer actually) in a medium-sized web-slash-mobile startup and the Macbook, they’d given me, failed and I decided to try something new. At that time I got increasingly interested in Lenovo Thinkpad (yeah, it hadn’t been IBM for quite a long time already). A couple of my colleagues had these X220 machines and they seemed pretty solid and professional, especially with all kinds of Linux installed on them (I worked with a bunch of Python devs and everybody used their favorite flavor of Linux). My transition from Macbook to Thinkpad was also dictated by how Macbook wouldn’t let me use i3wm (which I was completely sold on at the time) as the main WM. So I went to my manager an he approved my order. The problem was I wasn’t really familiar with modern ThinkPads then and ordered 14″ model (thought I could use all the extra screen space). I figured any Thinkpad will do. It was my mistake.

I got T431S, which was admittedly quite expensive at the time, but didn’t look like Thinkpad at all. If anything it resembled plastic version of Macbook. It had a rather disguising chiclet (island-type) keyboard, no LED indicators, thinner body and as a result much less ports (although for the record I do understand S stands for slim). The only thing it had in common with the previous generations of Thinkpads was the clit, which was kinda useless without the additional row of buttons, the device actually had no touchpad buttons at all as it mimicked the Macbook-style platform touchpad (awful, awful trend, actually). The hardware was of questionable quality and it gave me lots of headache on Linux (especially WiFi) despite the ThinkPads traditionally being considered one of the best laptops, when it comes to compatibility with Linux. I worked on this machine until the company went under, and got used to it somehow, but it never lived up to the image of Thinkpad I had in my head.

Even after that I didn’t give up on the Thinkpad series completely, though it clearly went downhill with every subsequent model. My wife got herself X230 at work and as I got to play with the device a bit, I had an impression that this is not as bad as 431S, so as the line moved forward I decided to go in the opposite direction. At that time I started working in a medium enterprise infosec company and they had Thinkpads all over the place, and most of these were the Thinkpads as I expected them to be from the day one. These were X201 models. They aren’t as outdated as the earlier ones but they have all the right features. Here is a short comparison between some of the latest X series models:

The keyboard is backlit instead. Get your tongue out of Apple’s ass, Lenovo!

Clit Buttons

Yes

Yes

Yes

Touchpad is a platform with areas for clit buttons, which is kinda sad.*

* – to be fair Thinkpad X250 actually went back to having hardware buttons, so X240 is not the whole new tendency, but rather disappointing stumble.

So, to sum it up for X201:

There is the right number of LED indicators (X220 and X230 have less and X240 seem to have none whatsoever) and they are mirrored on the back of the machine, which is convenient, when the lid is closed.

The classic Thinkpad keyboard is just right for coding. No trendy chiclet bullshit.

Ports and slots is the area, where the age of the machine shows the most. It doesn’t have any USB 3.0 ports and Mini DisplayPort would be actually nice. Still, it’s much better than X240.

There are two rows of buttons, one for clit mode and the other for the touchpad. Although I work with clit most of the time, I find having an additional bottom row rather convenient, yet I’d probably go with no touchpad at all.

Flashlight!

The only problem with X201 model for me is that it’s not available for sale officially anymore (at least where I live), I even tried to buy out my office X201, when leaving the company but they wouldn’t let me. So I found a place that sold used ThinkPads for a reasonable price and bought one from there. This machine is pure magic, and it doesn’t matter that it’s a bit outdated. It has i3 CPU (which is still fair these days), up to 8GB RAM (which is usually enough), extended 6 cell battery makes up for its age (easily gives me 5 or 4 hours of relaxed coding) and overall design hints at the times when the word Thinkpad meant something more than “an ugly plastic Macbook knockoff”. Without much exaggeration I can say, that in 12.5″ X line of ThinkPads (at least to me) the X201 model seems greatly superior to anything made before (due to being relatively modern) or after. It’s still relevant today and has the potential of being developer’s muse (fetishist talking) and workhorse.

An update is due: although I still think X201 is one of the best ThinkPad X-series machines, after a heated Reddit discussion X220 seems to be an even better model with all the advantages of X201 (except the amount of LEDs 😉 ), plus newer hardware and better screen. You probably should consider that machine if you are shopping for classic ThinkPads.

I can safely confess, that a couple years ago I didn’t know a single thing about programming. I was aware of some fairly abstract concepts and had a basic understanding of how it all works, but it definitely wasn’t enough. My English teacher had a saying about the active vocabulary: “You may learn all the words from the dictionary by heart, but unless you use them regularly and naturally, you don’t really know them”. My situation with programming was somewhat similar to knowing lots of trivia, but having no grasp on the practical side of things. I was determined on fixing it as soon as possible. I’ve tried reading a book or two, but it never really got me going. Well, it explained a couple things here and there, but it was like learning things by heart — tedious and irrelevant (on an absolutely unrelated note: Learn Python the Hard Way is great). At that point one of my techie friends suggested me throw the book away and learn by immersion: make an objective, stumble upon problems, see docs and StackOverflow for possible solutions. That was the moment I started looking for the first project, fairly simple, yet more challenging than a mindless Hello World routine.

Once, I was typing down a big portion of plain text on my old slow Android phone, using another memory hog Office Suite, with all those controls, sets of buttons on all sides of the screen and I wished there was something like Focus Writer for Ubuntu: basic, but fairly powerful in terms of achieving that special zen state. There weren’t many such projects in Android market back then (yeah, kids, it was called that in days of old) and this is how the idea of dType has stricken me. The concept was fairly simple: a minimalistic tool, that would let you jot down some text and then pass it to some other application (Evernote, Dropbox, Email, etc.) for saving or processing. It was simple enough to get grip at basics, yet quite challenging for a person, who haven’t seen Java code (or any code) before.

It was the moment, when I started coding. Well, let’s say it was more about googling intensively for just about anything. It was hard. Most of the time I didn’t know, what I was doing and asked fairly inept questions on StackOverflow. I still do, but now at least I can tell, what most parts of my code are for. First, the immersion is like trying to play piano blindfolded — my code probably stunk a big time, but at the end of the day it worked and it was encouraging. Interest in Android development helped me to get a job as a technical writer in a bunch of Android-related projects, especially OpenCV for Android. Since, I’ve been working mainly on C++ API references, I’ve started to delve into OOP concepts. I’ve been thoroughly explained, what is a class, a method and how they relate to each other, interfaces, abstract classes and the rest of this stuff. I’m extremely grateful for my mentors at there. Later, working on some other project, I had a chance to look closer at working Java code and see these concepts applied to Java. I immediately started to refactor dType code once again in attempt to implement thorough OOP design and shake off all the redundancy. My code became a little bit more laconic and neat. Not that it couldn’t get any better, but it was still a huge leap forward for me.

As long as I remember, dType was constantly improving. It was first a bunch of undocumented spaghetti code, which was somewhat straightened out at version 0.16 — it became the earliest version I bother to keep in the repository, since everything before that was a complete disaster. Perhaps, it’s still rather bad, but I’ve managed to shorten it almost twice, provide descriptive JavaDoc (for the sake of it, I know no one will probably bother to read) and fix a lot of issues while at it. I do feel a little attached to this code emotionally, since it is my first coding experience, that has grown into a little indie project of mine. Over the course of two years it has provided me with innumerable challenges and priceless practical experience, but it’s finally time for me to move on. I’ve taken great interest in Python lately, and started a couple of projects in it. Coming back to Java code became more and more daunting to me. I was also advised by several programmers, that I’d better concentrate on getting really proficient with one language for now. My growing frustration with Java verbosity ensured, that I would end up with Python as my language of choice.

Still, it was a hard decision for me to drop dType completely. People do use it and clone it on GitHub (yeah, it had a couple of official clones before the project has been moved back and forward, nevermind the actual numbers on GitHub). This project, though certainly quite niche and facile, does work for some. I decided, that this suspension is going to be more of a role shift for me: from active developer of this application to its maintainer. It will stay as an open repository at GitHub for you to clone and alter, it will stay published on Google Play. You can continue to use it in version 0.71. If people provide some relevant pull requests, I would be happy to merge them and even publish the resulting build as the new version of the app. It’s just that me myself don’t have the time or inclination for introducing new features anymore. It is now exactly the way I envisioned it, when I was starting. My big learning project has reached its objective. It’s finished. My priorities have changed, but if you do care, I would be glad to see your contributions. I’m not naive to think that it could become a huge open source project, mind you, but I do hope, that the app could continue living on its own, while I’m gone.

Update 06.10.2014: No one decided to contribute to this project yet, and probably never will as more than a year has passed since this post. Perhaps, this is for the best, as I’ve seen people complaining about a couple of nasty visual bugs on some devices. Me myself wasn’t able to work with it on Galaxy SIII as the screen gets black from time to time. So if you really want to revive the project, I can only wish you good luck with that. Seriously, if you want to try, give me your contacts, so that I could talk you out of this.

I would be speaking about my own experiences and you may have noticed my in the title, which is there to remind you about the subjective nature of this article. I don’t dare to speak about your blog or any other blog out there, but my own. I have no intention to convert you to my side, yet I would be very glad to see some of the like-minded people out there. I know they exist. My own research on the topic has unveiled, that although static site generators have this really substantial and zealous following, there are sober voices in the crowd, appealing to common sense. This is exactly why Kevin Dangoor went “From WordPress to Octopress and Back” or why Michael Rooney is “Migrating from Octopress to WordPress” — in the exact opposite direction from the majority of switchers.

Illustrating the distinctive trend among majority of switchers.

It doesn’t boil down solely to WordPress vs Octopress debate, as the issue in hands is much broader and may be represented as dynamic site engines vs static site generators. If you’re not aware of the difference between the two, here are the basics: with dynamic site your content is generated dynamically by an application running on the server side, static sites, on contrary, are pre-generated or written outright in HTML. Basically, dynamic sites are a web-applications that could change their behaviour instantly, depending on input and other factors, while static sites: well, they’re just HTML files passively sitting there, waiting for you to open and read them. Sure, with introduction of jQuerry, Java Script and HTML 5 to the mix, the difference gets a little less distinctive, but let’s stop at this level.

So, static vs dynamic. It could be virtually anything: Tumblr vs Hyde, Blogger vs Pelican, Movable Type vs Jekyll, etc. Major differences between the two models are more or less the same. It means that we should be really comparing the models themselves, not their instances.

So, what are the lucrative advantages of the static generation model? What makes people switch so quickly and without looking back? I came up with 3 most important reasons:

Almost endless customizability.

It’s mostly plain markup text files, that you can store in a Git repository.

Increased loading speed and security (well, no features – no loopholes, obviously).

All three are valid points and at some moment I went down the static path myself with all three in mind. First I went with Jekyll, then switched to Octopress. At some point I even tried to make Sphinx-generated site (sic!) work as a personal web-page, but lack of blog awareness and increasing complexity made me abandon this idea. When they say that running this kind of site is the easiest things to do, this is complete nonsense. In terms of comfortable workflow, I only can say a couple good things about pure Jekyll paired with GitHub Pages, but the result was so raw and required so much customization, that straightforward workflow was hardly an advantage. It is positioned as a toy for true geeks, tinkerers, but I don’t see how anyone could really benefit from this kind of tinkering (yeah, even geeks and tinkerers). I work in IT and we are here mainly to solve problems, not create tons of complimentary issues. Instead of reinventing the wheel, you could as well invest your time into something, that really needs to be done, perhaps — writing good stuff for your website.

I’m not the only one who noticed it, but for several months I’ve been experimenting with static generators, I’ve hardly written half a post. It was a common problem, as I googled it. People dug so deep into the endless customization and switching routine that eventually they’ve stopped writing. I may sound conservative to some, but I still think that blogging is mainly about writing. Sure, to some extent, this problem is applicable to dynamic platforms too (ping pong between WordPress and Blogger, anyone?), but with static generators it grows to catastrophic proportions. They are the ultimate time drain for nerds and wannabes. Sure, if your time worth basically nothing and constant tweaking your blog is the best part about having it, be my guest. To me it looks pretty much like that little joke from Fry&Laurie:

Oh, yes, my boyfriend’s a real DIY enthusiast, DIY mad.
He’s decorated the whole room and he’s put up all these bookshelves, and now he’s writing all these books to put on them.

Another seeming advantage of static site generators is their reliance on simple text, that could be utilized in distributed version control systems like Git. Most switchers assume, that they already use plain text and Git for code, why not use it for a blog? The problem is, that it also complicates things instead of easing them. Each generator has its own super-easy-workflow™ with different special folders, commands and scripts — quickly it becomes a mess. In this regard Git is basically one more noose on your neck. I’d focus on one especially nasty implementation of Git in such workflow — Octopress. You should fork the original Octopress repo, the _deploy folder will be used for deploy to the pages repository and sources should be committed to the special source branch. Now imagine what would happen if a somewhat major update gets pushed to the upstream of Octopress and your copy has been significantly modified over time. As someone has put it: “Octopress is great, until it breaks”. If you have some experience with Git and seen the Octopress workflow, you may imagine the hell it could possibly be. Actually, Octopress is itself a heavily modified version of Jenkins. No offence, but it all seems like Rupe Goldberg machine to me.

If you google it, you will find lots of people, performing full-featured benchmark tests of WordPress vs Octopress with a complete disregard for the principal differences between the two. People start speaking of security and speed benefits of static sites, forgetting about all the advantages of dynamic sites, that come at the price of increased complexity and bloat (yes, I do think WordPress is a tad bloated). Imagine the situation: you need to jot down a post draft on a public or someone else’s PC? Will you be cloning the repo, installing ruby, Octopress — setting up all the environment to write a short post? What about mobile support? Should you attempt to clone Octopress to your mobile phone? What about preserving drafts in the cloud without publishing them, but having access to them virtually from anywhere and anytime? Can you really put a price on that? People start using Evernote or similar service for drafts and such, but does it really worth introducing another tool to your workflow? Does mobility and availability worth another couple seconds of load time? My own choice is comfort and efficiency. I want my blog to be complimentary to my technical endeavors, not the other way around.

I’ve started thinking that less is actually more a long time ago and it may apply to blogging as to almost any other area of our life. You may notice, that I don’t even use the standalone WordPress install, but the pretty limited hosted WordPress site. I prefer to pay engineers at WordPress $13 for domain mapping and settle for less choice in themes, plugins and other options to focus on writing. We’re all too lost in the world of different platform and workflow options these days. Google it and you will see hundreds of rants about why platform A is deliberately better, than platform B, why static sites are better, than dynamic. You almost never hear that they help you in writing, no. It’s all about SEO, storage space, customization, load speed and other insignificant stuff, not directly related to blogging. We’re too obsessed with form and seem to forget about goddamn content. But, as I said before, it is all entirely subjective. You may still go down the static route, customize the ass out of your blog. You may even spend several years on writing your own static or dynamic blog engine from scratch, that will sure be absolutely unique and different from anything ever done before. Yet, I’m writing this post in a beautiful distraction-free WYSIWYG editor and my draft will be preserved online, when I press the Save button and no rake deploy is needed ever again.